


Hard Roads, Curious People

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [21]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Gen, Imperfect knowledge of Catholic minutiae, Plots and Intrigue, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, The one where Aramis and Milady are girlfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 09:36:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6233554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which our heroes hinder travellers on their road, and speed another on his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard Roads, Curious People

**Author's Note:**

> This series isn't dead! (The geography is hand waved, sorry about that.)

“The Franciscan has a falsy,” said Aramis, hovering in the shadows at the top of the spindly stairs. 

She did not look up from the map. “Hair? Teeth? Cock?”

“Leg,” he answered, wiping his hands with a soft cloth. “A few sabre scars on his torso, very old.”

“So?”

“So old soldiers don't normally go for the Order of Saint Francis. Too… peaceful. You're not curious?”

“I'm more curious as to why you put the stray mendicant in  _ my _ bed,” she answered honestly.

“Ah,” he answered softly, and disappeared into the bedchamber.  

She went back to the map. Now if rumour was correct and the village of Najac had been afflicted by plague, as happened so often in these dark days with troops and refugees moving all over, its blockade would stop up the pass for the rest of the month. A prudent commander like de Medina would not risk his men by breaking the quarantine lightly, but nor would he be eager to take the other route among the high and broken hills of the area, fraught with criss-crossed mule tracks and winding gorges prone to slips and landslides. She could help the rumours along, fake a dispatch or two, nothing too complicated. The column of Spanish reinforcements would discover that God did not favour them...

“He's dying.” Aramis was back, hovering in the doorway at the top of the stairs.

"I repeat: So?"    
  
"He asked for Last Rites."   
  
"I fail to see the problem," she said, tracking the finely drawn pathways, looking for a likely place to start a landslide. Christ! - her eyes were tired.   
  
"Do I look like a priest?" he demanded. She looked pointedly at the cassock slung loosely about his shoulders. "Exactly," he said, "I can't scrape through with a few kind words, he'll want extreme unction, the viaticum, the whole -"   
  
"Frou-frou."      
  
"And confession. I can't take confession!"   
  
"You haven't forgotten the words, surely? Get up there and take care of it." Aramis raked hands through his hair, wild-eyed. "If you're worried about slipping up, don't be. Your Franciscan is dying - who's he going to tell?"   
  
He pointed upwards.

She rolled her eyes.

“And Kitty,” he said mournfully. “Kitty would know.” 

“Then don't,” she waved an irritable hand in the improvised sign Aramis and Kitty mostly got by with, “don't  _ tell _ her.”

“She looks at me with those sad eyes…” 

“Aramis,” she said, with what she personally considered exceptional patience, “I have three thousand men and horses to lose in the hills and only tonight to plan. Deal with it.”

He leaned over her shoulder, his clothes emanating frankincense, and peered at the map. “Do you seek their deaths?” he asked calmly.

She thought about it. “Two weeks delay would be a sufficient miracle,” she said at last. It wasn’t a lie.

“Then here,” he pointed. “We could use the powder we took from Taggart’s lads and blow this little dam. The rising water in the corries… they'll waste a lot of time.”

“Can you make it look like natural causes?”

“Of course.” He quirked a smile. “You keep me around for something, after all.”

“That I do,” she answered softly. 

He put his hand on his heart and bowed his head demurely. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have a desperate moral crisis to navigate.” 

+++

She woke in the wee hours with sleep-crusted eyes, the quills of two feather pens digging into her cheekbone. An incense-rich warmth across her shoulders was probably Aramis’ cassock. The man himself sat at the table, chin on hands, watching her quietly. 

“I did not take his confession.”

“Oh?”

“He took mine.”

She reached for the small, sharp knife with which she cut her pens. “Then he'd better be dead.” She'd known too many clergymen to trust in their silence.

“Yes, yes,” he waved it off. “But then…” he dropped a weathered old pegleg on the table with a thunk and worked at the leather socket. Inside was a scrap of cloth which opened in his hand like a flower around a golden ring. He turned it to show the signet. “He gave us a job.”   

**Author's Note:**

> The dying Franciscan (who's really something else) is adapted from one of Aramis’ anecdotes in the later books. It amused me to posit that of all his deceptive, ‘what a strange coincidence’ stories, one at least might be literally true. 
> 
> As for losing soldiers in the hills, I figured a lot of their everyday work involves messing with supply lines, delaying reinforcements, sending messengers astray, and generally making the Spanish feel really unlucky. (And sometimes they rob banks or mess with royal successions. Fun times!) 
> 
> The on-line Catholic community is very contradictory about whether a layman could, _in articulo mortui_ , give last rites, and I remain somewhat confused. But! I found out it comes in several parts: Confession/Sacrament of Penance, Extreme Unction/Anointing of the Sick, (both best performed or possibly only performed by an ordained priest), and the Viaticum, 'something for the road', which anyone can do if they have some Eucharistic Wafer tucked in their pockets. Or you can walk somebody through reciting an Act of Contrition, I guess. Aramis feels a bit weird about the whole thing. 
> 
> Here are a couple of the links I used, if you're interested:
> 
> http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=994056
> 
> http://www.catholictradition.org/prayers1.htm


End file.
